Lily Talmers is a revelation on “It’s Cyclical Missing You.” In both her lyrics and performance, Talmers is intense, intelligent, and confrontational. She’s almost breathless at points. At moments, she’s scathing. Missing someone, some time, something, it’s exhausting. But Talmers shows it’s liberating, it’s revealing, it’s complicated.
We start with Talmers mourning a loss, “floating in a black ocean.” Her vocals are still relatively calm. She’s drawing her emotions from many places.
“It’s both speaking to romantic relationships and the network of people you have one minute and is gone when you shift lifestyles,” said Talmers.“Having gone through the cycle of teaching in this really intense way and then closing it off, I’ve learned how it feels in retrospect feeling I could’ve done a better job being present with them.”
It’s when Talmers confronts her own role in these past relationships that the album is at its most emotional and compelling. Talmers directly confronts herself on some songs, always to powerful effect. On “I Missed You Today,” she’s waging war with her mental states past and present. “How I changed to earn your love./How come I did that for so long?,” Talmers asks herself. “Read my lips./You don’t miss/anyone at all,” Talmers tells herself, perhaps because it’s not quite true. The regret and the sense of loss are both real.
“You can indulge on either end,” said Talmers. “You can choose to repress the pain of memory by assuming that something was all bad, or you can idealize it and allow yourself to forget the bad parts of it. I think good writing takes responsibility in a way.”
Now when she sings “you don’t miss anyone at all,” Talmers feels she’s “extending an invitation to the audience” to join her in that freedom.
It’s in relatively few songs, “Man of Stone,” where Talmers truly explodes, though only in her mind. “I wanna shake you ’til you’re humble/I wanna sprinkle dust into your eyes/I wanna crack you til you crumble,” she sings. She actually shows him love and makes every effort to open him up, knowing it will fail and knowing she’ll have to leave.
“How do you love someone who you feel you need to put so much work into educating how to love you back because they don’t even have the tools to even try?,” asked Talmers. “I oscillate between martyrdom and full generosity to that cause and then real anger and frustration.”
“You Can Do Whatever You Want To” is a standout moment on this album and an unexpectedly magnificent protest song. The options she offers at the beginning — a job at a factory, a demanding boss, a low grade hotel room — are less than appealing. There’s some illusion of choice, but it’s always going to involve barely staying afloat. The options she offers to the rich — malleable women, brazen destruction with no one to stop you — may sound more appealing to some while bringing out the moral horror in others. Even those living the American dream are causing someone else’s American nightmare. Between the lyrics and the strained vocals, this is the most cutting track of Talmers’.
“Being an American is a crazy thing full of wild paradoxes,” she said. “A lot of people I love really subscribe to the reasoning of the country and don’t have any grief over the way it behaves. It makes sense for me to communicate in a way that’s a little bit passive aggressive.”
In all the discussions of good and bad love and ways the world is messed up, Talmers produced a gem. “I don’t even know if I can claim to love people properly. But I think we’d be in a much better place if people thought that was a metric of importance.”
An old cliché of her father’s that states nothing is really that bad or that good makes for a sarcastic song in “The Big Idea.” Even after mocking the sentiment in song, Talmers can only manage to partially disavow it.
“Telling yourself anything that’s fundamentally true, you only half believe it,” said Talmers. “In these times especially, some things are really that bad. The song is trying to bring attention in a joking way to how things seem and really are often that bad.”
At the heart of all this missing and stressing, Talmers says there’s a question of faith.
“Do you understand that this moment is meant for you?,” Talmers asked. “Do you accept things as they are? Or are you going to try to force your reality onto it?”
Based on the lyrics, it’s clear Talmers is still trying to decide. Toward the end of the album, she says that humans at their best are “beautiful and kind.” On the final song, she questions whether there’s truly any meaning to existence. A great, thoughtful album like this concluding with a bit of resolution and a bit of uncertainty seems like a fitting ending, if the album was meant to end at all. Including cyclical in the title of her album was no accident. Talmers intended her album to run in a circle, just like waves of grief that are only slightly more processed.
“Things don’t go away, but they’re going to be different on their next turn,” said Talmers.
Perhaps this time, Talmers won’t try as hard to change others. Perhaps she’ll manage to change herself. Or, perhaps, she’ll do everything right just to wind up back again at track one. There are stages to this grief thing, after all.
Above is the full episode as aired on WUSB’s Country Pocket, including both my interview with Lily Talmers and the songs we discussed, starting with I Missed You Today, which explores the complicated grief that comes with missing someone who wasn’t particularly good for you. The interview begins with the second video in the playlist. You can hear the show live every Tuesday at 12pm on WUSB 90.1 FM or check the blog to watch it as a YouTube playlist. Visit http://www.WUSB.fm and https://www.lilytalmers.com for more.
Country Pocket 